This Farmer Hopes To Change Everything About How We Grow Food

Factory farming and year-round crops are putting strains on our farmland and producing subpar food. These cheap, fast, and degenerative methods are only optimal if you ignore the damage it’s doing to our environment and the nutrition it’s stripping from our food. Moreover, that cheap price tag right now for factory farming is offset by all of us paying a greater cost down the road to fix the messes made by the factory farming industry.

There’s a solution to this that almost seems too obvious and, yet, still feels just out of our grasp. Jesse Smith and his partners at Casitas Valley Farm are tired of the same problems arising from our poor food production practices. So they’re taking up the fight to grow great food in a way that makes sense for our planet and our health. They’re eschewing factory farming and going back to a system that listens to the earth to maximize the food they grow.

Smith and Casitas Valley Farm develop regenerative ways to grow food. Smith explains that using “Permaculture” and “Biomimicry” allows them (and us) to better understand not only the food but how the earth grows it with a better array of nutrients and utilization of the planet’s cycles.

It all sounds so simple: Use practices that make sense for the best harvest — something we did for millennia — but considering how we currently produce food, Smith’s methods are revolutionary. The Casitas Valley Farm team aims to increase biodiversity from the ground up … literally. The farm starts by focusing on their soils and its health by using naturalistic and classic ways of maintaining the nutrient content of the dirt, allowing it impart the most nutrients it can to the plants growing in that soil. Which, in layman’s terms means they’re making compost to fertilize their crops. That compost comes from the excess plant waste that naturally occurs on any farm.

That’s the cycle of life, death, and regeneration that makes farms like Casitas Valley the future of growing food.

The lack of using simple things like compost in factory farming is part of the problem. It’s faster and cheaper to use chemical fertilizers for the grows that natural ones — in part because the fields are so massive. So permaculture is just finding sustainable ways to grow food without using alternative sources of nutrients/fertilizers.

which results in more consumables at a higher unit cost and more land needed for the same output? It sounds like a great idea but maybe not sustainable in terms of feeding all the people that need to be fed.

I appreciate their efforts but I think the real future is in hydroponics and growing stuff in stackable trays that minimize your farm’s physical footprint (kinda how mushrooms are grown)